Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) has been jointly coordinated by Working Groups I (WGI) and II (WGII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report focuses on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events, the impacts of such events, and the strategies to manage the associated risks. The IPCC was jointly established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in particular to assess in a comprehensive, objective, and transparent manner all the relevant scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information to contribute in understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, the potential impacts, and the adaptation and mitigation options. Beginning in 1990, the IPCC has produced a series of Assessment Reports, Special Reports, Technical Papers, methodologies, and other key documents which have since become the standard references for policymakers and scientists.This Special Report, in particular, contributes to frame the challenge of dealing with extreme weather and climate events as an issue in decisionmaking under uncertainty, analyzing response in the context of risk management. The report consists of nine chapters, covering risk management; observed and projected changes in extreme weather and climate events; exposure and vulnerability to as well as losses resulting from such events; adaptation options from the local to the international scale; the role of sustainable development in modulating risks; and insights from specific case studies

Understanding the adaptive capacity of Australian small-to-medium enterprises to climate change and variability

Abstract Small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) comprise 96 per cent of all private businesses in Australia. The SME sector is the economy’s largest employer and the largest contributor to GDP. Moreover, SMEs play a significant role within socio-economic systems: they provide employment, goods and services and tax revenue for communities. Climate change may result in adverse business outcomes including business interruptions, increased investment and insurance costs, and declines in financial indicators such as measures of value, return and growth. After natural disasters, SMEs face greater short-term losses than larger enterprises, and may have lower adaptive capacity for various reasons. This study examines the underlying factors and processes shaping adaptive capacity of Australian SMEs’ to climate change and associated sea level rise. Specifically, the research asks the following questions: 1) How have SMEs considered and integrated adaptation into business planning? 2) What are the key underlying processes that constrain and influence the adaptive capacities of SMEs? and 3) What types of support are required to promote SME business continuity under a changing climate? The study adopts theories from Political Ecology and draws on literature on vulnerability and hazards to understand the processes that mediate the adaptive capacity of SMEs. The empirical research involved an online survey targeting SMEs, attending business engagement events hosted by chambers of commerce, 30 semi-structured interviews with secondary stakeholders, five case studies involving SMEs and secondary stakeholders, and finally a stakeholder workshop which brought together participants from both groups. The central conclusion of this study is that underlying contextual processes are critical to enhancing the adaptive capacity of SMEs. These processes include: the social relationships between SMEs and support organisations; the relationships within support organisations themselves; the agency of SMEs to direct resources toward building resilience into business continuity; SMEs’ perceptions of climate risks; and power struggles between support organisations. Unfavourable combinations of these processes have the potential to limit the adaptive choices that SMEs can adopt in order to overcome climate change and other related stresses on business continuity. These processes generate vulnerability and often occur at scales external to the SMEs;including relationships between different tiers of government as well as between various support organisations working with SMEs. These contextual processes have been largely overlooked in formal programmes that aim to build business resilience. The programmes have tended to be reactive and have tended to focus on business recovery during and after disasters rather than on altering the vulnerability context of SMEs through anticipatory prevention and preparedness or adaptation planning. This study suggests that the success of efforts to build the adaptive capacity of SMEs to future climate and related stresses will depend on how they address these underlying processes to facilitate the ability of SMEs to exercise their agency in pursuing adaptive choices that they value

Enhancing climate change communication: strategies for profiling and targeting Australian interpretive communities

Abstracthis research aimed to provide practical information about how to design communications on climate change adaptation and target these to the Australian population.   This was achieved by: (1) identifying and increasing awareness of different climate change audiences in Australia, and (2) evaluating how each audience responds to different types of climate change messages. Phase 1 of the study used audience segmentation analysis to identify the main climate change interpretive communities within Australia; that is, groups of Australians who share similar views and understandings about climate change.   A nationwide sample consisting of 3,096 Australian residents (aged 15 to 108 years, 47% male and 53% female) completed an online survey assessing a broad range of psychological and behavioural factors related to climate change.   Latent profile analysis applied to the psychological variables suggested that this Australian sample consists of five distinct interpretive communities: Alarmed (26%), Concerned (39%), Uncertain (14%), Doubtful (12%), and Dismissive (9%). Validation analyses revealed that these groups differed in terms of how they responded to perceived climate change threats, and also in their support for particular climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.   Phase 2 of the project examined how Australian interpretive communities respond to climate change adaptation messages and identified the specific message attributes that drive these responses. 1,031 Australian residents (aged 18 to 66 years, 49.8% male, 50.2% female) completed an online survey assessing a similar set of psychological and behavioural responses to climate change to those assessed in Phase 1.   Respondents subsequently viewed six climate change adaptation messages that were randomly allocated from a pool of 60 messages sourced from the internet.   Messages were pre-coded on 10 communication cues (e.g., language complexity, normative influence), and respondents rated them on four judgement dimensions: perceived threat, perceived efficacy, fear control (message rejection), and danger control (message acceptance).   Latent profile analysis applied to the psychological variables identified three climate change interpretive communities in this sample: Alarmed (34.4%), Uncommitted (45.2%), and Dismissive (20.3%).   Judgement analysis methodology (Cooksey, 1996) found that the three interpretive communities based their threat and efficacy evaluations on unique combinations of communication cues, and that high perceived threat and high perceived efficacy were related to message acceptance for all communities.   Effective messages for Dismissive respondents used simple language and did not emphasise descriptive social norms.   Uncommitted audience members responded positively to messages that focused on preventing losses and had a strong emotional component.   Alarmed respondents preferred messages that focused on local issues and had a collectivist frame. Providing specific adaptation advice in messages was found to be effective for all communities. The results largely support the Extended Parallel Processing Model of risk communication (Witte, 1992), and suggest that message attributes should be adjusted to effectively communicate with different climate change interpretive communities within Australia.Please cite this report as:Hine, D, Phillips, W, Reser, J, Cooksey, R, Marks, A, Nunn, P, Watt, S, Ellul, M 2013 Enhancing climate change communication: Strategies for profiling and targeting Australian interpretive communities, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 95.his research aimed to provide practical information about how to design communications on climate change adaptation and target these to the Australian population.   This was achieved by: (1) identifying and increasing awareness of different climate change audiences in Australia, and (2) evaluating how each audience responds to different types of climate change messages. Phase 1 of the study used audience segmentation analysis to identify the main climate change interpretive communities within Australia; that is, groups of Australians who share similar views and understandings about climate change.   A nationwide sample consisting of 3,096 Australian residents (aged 15 to 108 years, 47% male and 53% female) completed an online survey assessing a broad range of psychological and behavioural factors related to climate change.   Latent profile analysis applied to the psychological variables suggested that this Australian sample consists of five distinct interpretive communities: Alarmed (26%), Concerned (39%), Uncertain (14%), Doubtful (12%), and Dismissive (9%). Validation analyses revealed that these groups differed in terms of how they responded to perceived climate change threats, and also in their support for particular climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.   Phase 2 of the project examined how Australian interpretive communities respond to climate change adaptation messages and identified the specific message attributes that drive these responses. 1,031 Australian residents (aged 18 to 66 years, 49.8% male, 50.2% female) completed an online survey assessing a similar set of psychological and behavioural responses to climate change to those assessed in Phase 1.   Respondents subsequently viewed six climate change adaptation messages that were randomly allocated from a pool of 60 messages sourced from the internet.   Messages were pre-coded on 10 communication cues (e.g., language complexity, normative influence), and respondents rated them on four judgement dimensions: perceived threat, perceived efficacy, fear control (message rejection), and danger control (message acceptance).   Latent profile analysis applied to the psychological variables identified three climate change interpretive communities in this sample: Alarmed (34.4%), Uncommitted (45.2%), and Dismissive (20.3%).   Judgement analysis methodology (Cooksey, 1996) found that the three interpretive communities based their threat and efficacy evaluations on unique combinations of communication cues, and that high perceived threat and high perceived efficacy were related to message acceptance for all communities.   Effective messages for Dismissive respondents used simple language and did not emphasise descriptive social norms.   Uncommitted audience members responded positively to messages that focused on preventing losses and had a strong emotional component.   Alarmed respondents preferred messages that focused on local issues and had a collectivist frame. Providing specific adaptation advice in messages was found to be effective for all communities. The results largely support the Extended Parallel Processing Model of risk communication (Witte, 1992), and suggest that message attributes should be adjusted to effectively communicate with different climate change interpretive communities within Australia

Advancing Stability in an Era of Change

Argues for an integrated grantmaking strategy for world security, stewardship, and the peaceful management of change. Focuses on the individual, the nation-state, civil society organizations, private sector corporations, and multilateral institutions

Discovering Social Events through Online Attention

abstract: Twitter is a major social media platform in which users send and read messages (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters. In recent years this communication medium has been used by those affected by crises to organize demonstrations or find relief. Because traffic on this media platform is extremely heavy, with hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day, it is difficult to differentiate between times of turmoil and times of typical discussion. In this work we present a new approach to addressing this problem. We first assess several possible “thermostats” of activity on social media for their effectiveness in finding important time periods. We compare methods commonly found in the literature with a method from economics. By combining methods from computational social science with methods from economics, we introduce an approach that can effectively locate crisis events in the mountains of data generated on Twitter. We demonstrate the strength of this method by using it to locate the social events relating to the Occupy Wall Street movement protests at the end of 2011.The article is published at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.010200

Food security, risk management and climate change

This report identifies major constraints to the adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia. This report is about food security, climate change and risk management. Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented level of food security for more than half a century, but there are new uncertainties emerging and it would be unrealistic – if not complacent – to assume the same level of food security will persist simply because of recent history. The project collected data from more than 36 case study organisations (both foreign and local) operating in the Australian food-supply chain, and found that for many businesses,  risk management practices require substantial improvement to cope with and exploit the uncertainties that lie ahead. Three risks were identified as major constraints to adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia:  risk management practices; an uncertain regulatory environment – itself a result of gaps in risk management; climate change uncertainty and projections about climate change impacts, also related to risk management

The countryside in urbanized Flanders: towards a flexible definition for a dynamic policy

The countryside, the rural area, the open space, … many definitions are used for rural Flanders. Everyone makes its own interpretation of the countryside, considering it as a place for living, working or recreating. The countryside is more than just a geographical area: it is an aggregate of physical, social, economic and cultural functions, strongly interrelated with each other. According to international and European definitions of rural areas there would be almost no rural area in Flanders. These international definitions are all developed to be used for analysis and policy within their specific context. They are not really applicable to Flanders because of the historical specificity of its spatial structure. Flanders is characterized by a giant urbanization pressure on its countryside while internationally rural depopulation is a point of interest. To date, for every single rural policy initiative – like the implementation of the European Rural Development Policy – Flanders used a specifically adapted definition, based on existing data or previously made delineations. To overcome this oversupply of definitions and delineations, the Flemish government funded a research project to obtain a clear and flexible definition of the Flemish countryside and a dynamic method to support Flemish rural policy aims. First, an analysis of the currently used definitions of the countryside in Flanders was made. It is clear that, depending on the perspective or the policy context, another definition of the countryside comes into view. The comparative study showed that, according to the used criteria, the area percentage of Flanders that is rural, varies between 9 and 93 per cent. Second, dynamic sets of criteria were developed, facilitating a flexible definition of the countryside, according to the policy aims concerned. This research part was focused on 6 policy themes, like ‘construction, maintenance and management of local (transport) infrastructures’ and ‘provision of (minimum) services (education, culture, health care, …)’. For each theme a dynamic set of criteria or indicators was constructed. These indicators make it possible to show where a policy theme manifests itself and/or where policy interventions are possible or needed. In this way every set of criteria makes up a new definition of rural Flanders. This method is dynamic; new data or insights can easily be incorporated and new criteria sets can be developed if other policy aims come into view. The developed method can contribute to a more region-oriented and theme-specific rural policy and funding mechanism

Determinants of risk: Exposure and vulnerability

Many climate change adaptation efforts aim to address the implications of potential changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of weather and climate events that affect the risk of extreme impacts on human society. That risk is determined not only by the climate and weather events (the hazards) but also by the exposure and vulnerability to these hazards. Therefore, effective adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and practices also depend on a rigorous understanding of the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability, as well as a proper assessment of changes in those dimensions. This chapter aims to provide that understanding and assessment, by further detailing the determinants of risk as presented in Chapter 1. The first sections of this chapter elucidate the concepts that are needed to define and understand risk, and show that risk originates from a combination of social processes and their interaction with the environment (Sections 2.2 and 2.3), and highlight the role of coping and adaptive capacities (Section 2.4). The following section (2.5) describes the different dimensions of vulnerability and exposure as well as trends therein. Given that exposure and vulnerability are highly context-specific, this section is by definition limited to a general overview (a more quantitative perspective on trends is provided in Chapter 4). A methodological discussion (Section 2.6) of approaches to identify and assess risk provides indications of how the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability can be explored in specific contexts, such as adaptation planning, and the central role of risk perception and risk communication. The chapter concludes with a cross-cutting discussion of risk accumulation and the nature of disasters